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Left Wondering Why VideoLan Relicensed Some Code to LGPL

Thursday 22 November 2012 by Bradley M. Kuhn

I first met the original group of VLC developers at
the Solutions GNU/Linux
conference in 2001. I had been an employee of FSF for about a year at
the time, and I recall they were excited to tell the FSF about the
project, and very proud that they'd used FSF's premier and preferred
license (at the time): GPLv2-or-later.

The main reason to use the LGPL,
as RMS put
eloquently long ago, is for situations where there are many
competitors and developers would face serious difficulty gaining
adoption of a strong-copylefted solution. Another more recent reason
that I've discovered to move to weaker licenses (and this was the case
with Qt) is to normalize away some of
the problems
of proprietary relicensing. However, neither reason applies to
libVLC.

VLC is the most popular media player for desktop computers. I know
many proprietary operating system users who love VLC and it's the first
application they download to a new computer. It is the standard for
desktop video viewing, and does a wonderful job advocating the value of
software freedom to people who live in a primarily proprietary software
world.

So, I'm left baffled: does the VLC community actually believes the LGPL
would solve that problem? (To be clear, I haven't seen any official
statement where the VideoLAN Organization claims that relicensing will
solve that issue, but others speculate that it's the reason.) Regardless,
I don't think it's a problem worth solving. The specters of
“Application Store” terms and conditions are something to
fight against wholly in an uncompromising way. The copyleft licensing
incompatibilities with such terms are actually a signaling mechanism to
show us that these stores are working against software freedom
actively. I hope developers will reject deployment to these application
stores entirely.

Therefore, I'm left wondering what VLC seeks to do here. Do they want
proprietary application interfaces that use their core libraries? If
so, I'm left wondering why: VLC is already so popular that they could
pull adopters toward software freedom by using the strong copyleft of
GPL on libVLC. It seems to me they're making a bad trade-off to get only
marginally more popular by allowing some proprietary derivatives. OTOH,
I guess I should cut my losses on this point and be glad they stuck with
any copyleft at all and didn't go all the way to a permissive
license.

Update (2012-11-30): It's been pointed out to me that
VLC has relegated certain code from VLC into a library called libVLC,
and that's the code that's been relicensed. I've made today changes to
the post above to clarify that issue.

Both previously and presently, I have been employed by and/or done work for various organizations that also have views on Free, Libre, and Open Source Software. As should be blatantly obvious, this is my website, not theirs, so please do not assume views and opinions here belong to any such organization. Since I do co-own ebb.org with my wife, it may not be so obvious that these aren't her views and opinions, either.